When I first saw the buildings, it indeed looked as if they were floating way above the rest of the world. However, by the time I could get to a decent shooting position, much of the fog had already dissipated. Still though, what was left made a shot interesting enough to brave the roadside brambles and whatever else might have lurked in the brush. Thanks for the nice words said toward this image.

Really nice, Chris. Two suggestions (ignore to taste):How about cropping off the field?I see a slight gray fringe around the buildings. This mirrors my own difficulties making local adjustments in these kinds of scenes.

Really nice, Chris. Two suggestions (ignore to taste):How about cropping off the field?I see a slight gray fringe around the buildings. This mirrors my own difficulties making local adjustments in these kinds of scenes.

I have given the crop some thought but wonder if it doesn't give scale to the mass of the rocky crag (I would love other opinions here!). The gray haloing is jpeg compression as the print shows no abnormal light behaviors there. I made several copies of the raw file and adjusted each for the fog and details within then blended them all together. I will look again and see if I picked up some jpeg artifacts in the scaling.

Cropping about half the bottom field really improves the dynamics. Rather than have about half the visual importance in the field the interest shifts immediately to the lighthouse area. I'd feel the same if there was anything of interest in the field. I love how that crop would add drama while still having the field set the place. The other benefit of the crop is to lend more importance to the small sea area on the right. We then see the immediate relationship between the sea and the lighthouse without the large, dark foreground stealing so much attention.

Hmmmmmm....it's a tossup for me but I do see the merit of your suggestion. As to the graying suggested earlier, I do believe you are right and I was wrong as per jpeg compression...I did a bit of a fix on that as well as Louoate's crop suggestion.

I agree with Eric on the PP-ing, but I like the original crop better, it seems more "anchored" to me. On the other hand, I don't like the foreground portion of the field itself, I find the dark clumps (plants?, hard to tell at the reduced size) distracting. Not sure what the solution is....

With Chris' permission I'm posting my suggestions originally sent to him in PM. I really love his image of Pt. Sur Light - but felt that removing the foreground, to get a more pleasing compositional emphasis on the facility, removed the reality of the "sense of place" one gets when there. The remoteness of the light facilities on top of that huge rock, jutting out from the coast on its peninsula is an important part of the image, IMO. To wit, I offered the following:

"What if you left the foreground in, but brought the tone of it down with a gradient so that it leads the eye out to the rock/fog/facility? I played with it and think that if you increased the exposure in the gradient by about 2/3 stop, brought the highlights down to zero, shadows to zero, and then negative clarity to the max, and sharpness down until it looks 'foggy' in the gradient to tie the foreground into your fog/clouds? I also would reduce the saturation in the gradient a bit, in order to keep the main color-focal-point at the top of the rock. I 'finished' by taking it into CS6 and doing a content-aware-scale of the foreground to compress it, yet leave it with a sense of 'out-there-ness.'

Hope you don't mind, but I took the liberty of doing an example of what I'm talking about:

Your original post:

Your final crop in the post:

And my adjustments to (hopefully) keep the best of both worlds:

. . . end of quote from PM."

Chris liked it. I think this is a perfect-case image for effective use of content aware scale.